Cadillac F1’s team principal watched his last team fold. Now he has a second chance

This article is part of our Origin Stories series, an inside look at the backstories of the clubs, drivers, and people fueling the sport.

When Graeme Lowdon walks into the Formula One paddock next season, as Cadillac makes its debut as the grid’s 11th team, he’ll be doing something he hasn’t done in nearly a decade — running an F1 operation from the pit wall.

The last time he did, things didn’t end well. Manor Marussia went into administration in 2014 with £35 million ($46.6m) in debt, missed the final three races of the season, and barely made it back to the grid the following year. Lowdon left at the end of 2015. The team folded a year later.

Now, the 60-year-old Englishman is leading a General Motors-backed project with resources his old outfit could only dream of. It’s a different challenge entirely.

Lowdon stayed close to F1 in the years since Manor — managing former Sauber driver Zhou Guanyu and advising on what was then the Andretti Global bid for an 11th F1 team. When Michael Andretti stepped back from the project in October 2024 and GM took full control, the operation needed a team principal; someone who’d actually built an F1 team from scratch, who understood the regulations, who knew the paddock.

On December 6, 2024, Cadillac announced Lowdon had the job.

It’s an unlikely path back to F1 for someone whose early career had nothing to do with racing. Lowdon received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at Sheffield University and later pursued his MBA at Newcastle, but his career began in the power industry. It wasn’t until the 1990s that he found his way into motorsports, when the company he worked for in Switzerland sponsored an IndyCar team.

He left his job in the power industry to create his own technology business, Industry On-line, and start a Formula Renault team with his wife. He later built the company into Just2Clicks, riding the dot-com boom with online trading platforms. The financial success helped him grow his motorsport team.

While these businesses gave him the financial backing to invest in motorsports, they also taught him how to navigate the process of creating a startup. And a majority of Lowdon’s F1 involvement throughout his career has been in startup businesses.

“Starting a team and understanding what it takes to build a team, it’s a very different challenge to, you know, one that Toto (Wolff) would have, for example, running an OEM business with Mercedes with no cost cap.”

Lowdon joined the new Virgin Racing team in 2009 (Mark Thompson / Getty Images)

He joined Manor Motorsport in 2000 in a non-executive commercial role and helped the team secure a place in F1 in 2010, initially under the name Virgin Racing. Lowdon’s ties to Richard Branson’s Virgin Group came from Nomad Digital, which counted Virgin Rail Group as a customer. But throughout its seven-season journey, Manor endured multiple name changes and financial struggles. Jules Bianchi scored the team’s first points in the 2014 Monaco GP, when it operated as Marussia, but he suffered a fatal car wreck later that year in the Japanese GP.

That same season, Marussia went into administration with £35 million worth of debts, having to miss the last three race weekends of the year. Businessman Stephen Fitzpatrick brought it back as Manor Marussia for 2015, but the team struggled. Lowdon, serving as sporting director, resigned at the end of the season. The team folded a year later.

Manor Motorsport, though, wasn’t Lowdon’s last stint in F1 before the Cadillac announcement last December. He was part of Zhou Guanyu’s management team and was an advisor on the Cadillac project for two years, starting when it was an Andretti-led bid.

“I am completely and utterly obsessed with this idea of the importance of the team,” Lowdon said to The Athletic, explaining why he joined the project. He added: “We want to bring a team in that gives the fans something different and something more. And so when there is that opportunity, for me, it’s just irresistible.”

It wasn’t an easy journey to the grid for Cadillac. Dan Towriss, CEO of TWG Motorsports and Cadillac Formula 1 Team, told The Athletic that pressure was mounting on both sides, back when Andretti led the project and prior to F1 accepting the bid. Initially, Formula One Management rejected the bid, but Towriss felt the project addressed the objections.

“But I think Michael (Andretti) felt a lot of pressure as well,” Towriss said. “And I think at the end, he was just like, I want this project to succeed, and I think he felt like his acceptance in Formula One, or his presence, was going to hinder that.”

Andretti Global announced that Michael Andretti was stepping back from his role as CEO and chairman in October 2024, and Cadillac, as a fully General Motors-backed bid, received final approval in March 2025. At that point, Lowdon had been team principal for three months, and it wasn’t always the plan for him to hold that role.

“He started out just as someone who had done a new bid, led a new team into Formula One before, and it wasn’t like there was a guarantee, or that he was always going to be the one,” Towriss said. “But his expertise, his knowledge of the regulations, was so profound through the process, it became a very natural conclusion through the process that he would be the one to lead it.”

As the project came together, even when there was opposition to what they were building, Towriss said he never saw discouragement from Lowdon, his confidence not wavering. He added: “I saw the strength of his character, as well as his knowledge and expertise. He’s also very well respected in the paddock. I got to see through this controversial process, where some of the teams weren’t excited about an 11th team; it didn’t hinder any of Graeme’s relationships, which told me this is someone who’s been in the paddock a long time and is very well respected.

“When you put all that together, that’s the perfect guy to lead this team and to be our first team principal.”

At one point, there were rumors that there were talks with former Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, and Towriss denied the speculation, saying: “Never once did we have even a conversation with Christian.”

Lowdon speaks with Ferrari’s Fred Vasseur in Singapore (Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images)

Becoming a team principal carries similarities to his previous roles as CEO, Lowdon said, noting that F1 is the “greatest team game in the world.”

“There’s a thousand players on each side, and it’s my job to try to get the very best people into the team, get them into the right roles, and make sure they have the resources,” he explained. “I’ve got a degree in engineering, but I can’t design a Formula One car or manufacture one. I can’t design a media schedule or a communications campaign. I’m not an accountant or anything else.”

But outside of the hiring process (where Lowdon says they’re trying to focus and hire on attitude rather than ability, as you can teach the latter) and bringing in resources to help the personnel excel, it must feel like a team, that aspect being something Lowdon is fascinated by. He said: “The challenge for any team principal is how do you ensure that you have a group of people who feel as together when winning, and as together when they’re facing their biggest challenges as well.”

Throughout this process, Lowdon has learned a few things about himself. At 60, he admits “there is a brutal reality to age” — he gets tired more quickly than he did during his years at Manor. “I genuinely wish I were 20 years younger doing this because it’s draining.”

But there’s something that makes it worth it. A lot of people who worked with him at Manor — a team that went into administration, scraped by season to season, and eventually folded — have come back to work for him at Cadillac. People who lived through the financial chaos are choosing to follow him into another startup, even if this one has GM backing.

“I’ve learned that maybe some of the things that we’ve done in the past have been right,” he said, “because if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have come back.”

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